Subject: [Qirg] transport layer & specs

From: Rodney Van Meter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2022 11:40:01 +0900

Wojtek et al.,

One important design principle in  networks is “separation of concerns”. In the IP and OSI stacks, transport is E2E, and the nodes in the middle of the path don’t need to be involved. In 1G quantum networks, entanglement swapping and purification must be executed in multiple nodes along the path — creating E2E entanglement is a distributed computation. So it’s no longer possible to separate them and do transport E2E only.

This is part of what led to our SDN-like RuleSet proposal.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07092

My current expectation is that there will be a single network protocol specification, sitting above link-layer entanglement creation and incorporating purification and entanglement swapping. How to do that in *inter*networking is a more complicated issue, addressed partially in our paper above.

I expect there will eventually be a set of specs:

* creating E2E entanglement on 1G networks (RuleSets?)
	- connection setup
	- messages and semantics for creation actions (purification, swapping, when to discard, etc.)
* multiplexing of resources
* extension to 1G internetworks

There will probably be additional ones on how to interface to a link (a la IP over Ethernet), APIs, etc. And eventually it will be extended to 2G and possibly other types of networks.

So my opinion is that we don’t need a transport protocol, in the sense of UDP/QUIC/TCP/SCTP…

—Rod

Rodney Van Meter
[email-masked]
Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Japan